YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY, BUDDY

A decade or so back, perpetually youthful Dick Clark raised a
few eyebrows when he stamped his name on a line of male facial-care
products. It seemed a curio not just because Clark had already
lapsed into cultural irrelevance but also because men typically
don't take to primping and grooming products, at least beyond
shaving gear or the Grecian Formula one might find in Dad's or
Grandpa's medicine cabinet.

Since the dawn of the consumer era, there has been a grand chasm
between the sexes in terms of daily regimens. Women have been
disproportionately targeted and brainwashed as to the need for
products to spackle the unsightly holes in their personal
aesthetic. With massive fiscal disparity, they have paid out
millions of dollars to smooth, paint, condition, gloss, mask and
perfume themselves â€” learning how to delineate between
â€œvolumizingâ€? conditioners and â€œbotanicalâ€?
ingredients along the way â€” whereas guys, if anything, kidded
themselves that Polo was expensive enough to make them smell good.
Well, you've come a long way, buddy, because the health and beauty
aids (HBA) business is betting you're just as vain as your female
counterpart, and it's probably right.

In the past six months, HBA marketers have flooded airwaves,
magazines and Web pages with a rash of new products â€œjust for
menâ€? â€” more specifically, for guys from adolescence to
age 34. With winking humor and more innuendo than a flight of beer
commercials, marketers of such staid brands as Nivea, Blistex and
Old Spice have attempted to inject some testosterone into their
image, while such new brands as Maxim Hair Color for Men and Axe
deodorant body spray (a hybrid deodorant and fragrance) have pushed
men's toiletries into whole new categories. All are banking on a
new generation of guys who, apparently, have eschewed the more
austere, manly manhood of yore for more mirror time, ostensibly in
the hope of attracting women.

â€œIf there were only guys on this planet, male grooming
products wouldn't exist,â€? says Diggi Tompson, North American
brand director for Unilever's Axe. â€œIt was always amusing to
look to the deodorant category. For years, all these ads were
saying was: This one works for 12 hours, this one for 18, this one
for 36. But the wrong conversation was being had. We asked,
â€˜Why are men using these products in the first place?â€™
Girls.â€?

A tenor of this new wave of ads is a zanier, hyperbolic twist on
the more general predilections of the advertising industry to sell
sex. In the Axe TV spots, a young woman demonstrates the relatively
new body spray concept on a mannequin, which ends up arousing her
to various comic effects, such as her boyfriend storming onto the
set and punching the mannequin's head off (â€œRoger! We were
just talking!â€?). Ads for Combe, Inc.-licensed Maxim hair
color, true to its namesake magazine's horndog image, basically
proffer the product as an aphrodisiac, showing guys â€œgetting
aheadâ€? at work by getting hit on by particularly hot female
co-workers. Even the king of ad stodge, Procter & Gamble, hawks
its body spray extension of Old Spice with uncharacteristic
swagger. One ad features a strutting mailroom guy hot to get to his
final delivery â€” the executive vice president's office.
â€œNice package,â€? the vixenish evp says, as the camera
shoots the guy from between her shapely legs.

All of this collectively begs the question: Are guys of this
generation just hornier than previous ones? To read Maxim,
its even dumber brother publication Stuff or its competitor
FHM, it would seem profoundly so, but this has also become a
case of media programming the message.

The ascent of these publications in the past half decade has
helped define the notion of the young male â€œlifestyleâ€?
in the same way that women's service, fashion and teen magazines
have programmed females to primp for 50 years or more.
Maxim's circulation base stands at around 2.5 million,
Stuff's at 1.1 million, and each is still growing amid a
moribund ad market and a slow, grinding erosion of print media in
general. Where once the likes of Sassy, Seventeen and
Cosmo were the province of such groupthink fluff as dating
tips, love quizzes and PR product placements masked as
â€œwhat's hotâ€? reviews, the new boys' books have proven
that males ages 14 to 34 can be just as susceptible.

â€œFor all these years, women had these magazines that
covered relationships, fashion, horoscopes, celebrities, etcetera.
But what did guys have? Sports,â€? says Tompson. â€œThese
[new] magazines provide a forum that says, â€˜OK, guys, it's OK
to talk about this kind of thing.â€™â€?

Indeed, as the top Maxim licensing exec sees it, this new
male predilection for primping represents a sort of liberation for
guys. They have shrugged off the stoic complacency of their fathers
to embrace new possibilities in their personal aesthetics, such as
hair color for a fun twist, not just to â€œmask the
gray.â€? â€œI don't know if â€˜vainâ€™ is the word
â€” guys are more conscious of their appearance, and there's a
difference between the two,â€? says Barry Pincus, Maxim's
manager of brand development. â€œIn a way they're less vain,
not worried about being different, but more adaptable. It's really
a sign of maturity to some degree. Guys are more willing to
experiment, more willing to take some risks, in a more casual
way.â€?

Whether they're taking enough risks to buoy this spate of new
products is not a simple drop kick. Between October 1999 and
September 2000, American males used a mean of 3.4 toiletry products
in their daily regimen, according to Chicago-based Mintel
International Group. After moderate growth throughout the 1990s,
men's toiletries alone accounted for just over $4 billion of the
$33.5 billion personal care products market in 2001, according to
Datamonitor.

As for younger guys, there does seem to be a bent. To look at
Mintel's 1999-2000 data, men of all ages tend to use standard
products â€” such as deodorants, shaving creams and gels
â€” at about the same rates. In terms of hair styling products,
however, younger segments showed much more activity, even before
the onslaught of new products: 36 percent of guys 18 to 24 used
hair gels, mousses and the like; 34 percent of guys 25 to 34 used
them; and, surprisingly, 11 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds used
hair-coloring products, 6 percent more than 24- to 34-year-olds and
even more than the 7 percent of gray-fleeing 45- to
54-year-olds.

So we can see the younger generation's disproportionate openness
to trial and error in its personal presentation. Further, the
growth of Maxim magazine, et al., indicates, among other
things, that this young group is seeking products that address
grooming directly, not as a bubble-market segment on such broader
male-skewing publications as Esquire, Playboy or Sports
Illustrated. Just so, newer, fresher voices â€” like that
of Axe â€” are going to resonate deeper with the market than,
say, that of Nivea for Men, which still bears the feminine Nivea
name. And just so, most of these new products, from Blistex's
male-only formula to P&G's Old Spice body spray, appeared on
the shelves in straight, sleek, black packaging â€” the polar
extreme of the florals and pastels that one typically associates
with women's products.